Tag Archives: sanitation

Healthcare and nutrition are some of the many ways that women worldwide invest their time and income in their families, well surpassing the amount of contribution from men (Photo Credit: Amnesty International).

Worldwide, women invest 90% of their income in their families and communities; men, only 30%-40% of theirs. It’s a great stat for women’s rights advocates, because it helps us tell this story: when women participate, things change.

For example:

When designed with women’s input, safe drinking water and sanitation programs function better and last longer. This, in turn, can give women back their time for work, school, or literacy training, and let girls just be girls.

Every year, 40 billion working hours are lost to water collection worldwide, mostly by women and girls. This violates their rights to employment and education by taking up time and energy; and their rights to safety and dignity by exposing them to injury, animal attack, and physical and sexual violence. Since the water they collect is usually unsafe (if it were safe, chances are they wouldn’t have to walk far to get it, because a tap would be available near home), it violates their right to health, exposing them to Neglected Tropical Diseases, diarrhea, even uterine prolapse from carrying heavy loads.

Lack of sanitation and safe drinking water violates the right to safe and adequate housing. Combined with poor hygiene, it makes people sick because they ingest fecal matter without even knowing it, creates breeding grounds for insects carrying diseases like trachoma, and contaminates water sources; water-borne illnesses impact children most, keeping more kids from school and causing trauma for the many parents whose children don’t survive these diseases, up to 2,000 each day.

Low-income demonstrators in Amritsar on May 7,2012. (Photo Narinder Nanu/AFP/GettyImages)

This August 15, India will celebrate its 65th year of independence from the British Empire. Since then, the country has seen some improvements in the livelihoods of the poorest of its citizens. However, India still has some of the highest rates of malnutrition in the world.

Wow, what fabulous news– according to the United Nations, almost 564 million people in India have cell phones. Sounds great considering how few people had access to telephones 10 years ago. But, oops, the same study shows that only 366 million people in India have access to any proper sanitation. So that means that about 200 million more people have telephones than toilets and that three-quarters of a BILLION people in what is supposedly a rising power in the world do not have access to proper sanitation. It’s not only a no-brainer that the state governments in India (the state government is responsible for health not the central government) need to ensure adequate sanitation for all its citizens, but it’s also a no-brainer that this is a human rights violation. I’ll just quote from General Comment 14 of the United Nations Economic and Social Council here:

Accessibility also implies that medical services and underlying determinants of health, such as safe and potable water and adequate sanitation facilities, are within safe physical reach, including in rural areas. Accessibility further includes adequate access to buildings for persons with disabilities.

So, I think Led Zeppelin (video above) says it better than I could. After all, when 200 million more people can talk on the phone than have a safe place to go to the bathroom, I’d say that India is having “another communication breakdown”.